Hire outside the box

Look beyond product and engineering for the right people to help you unleash awesomeness. The qualities needed to be an effective effectiveness person is not specific to software or agile. How do we find the career switchers, create opportunities, and develop them.

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Michele Playfair - Cards Against Agility Game

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Interactive

Beginner

The Agile version of Cards Against Humanity. You may have seen versions of this on the internet, but rest assured this version has been enhanced to yield a minimum of 156% more awesomeness. Relatively fresh from its stellar debut at the 2017 Xero Unconference!

Ruma Dak - Agile Dojo at MYOB: 6 weeks of Accelerated Learning

schedule 1 year ago

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30 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Starting in November 2017, a crew at MYOB embarked on an exciting 6 weeks journey of an Agile Dojo! Guided by an Agile Coach, it was an intensive learning experience which gave us opportunities to challenge the status quo, carry out various experiments, introduced them to new tools, techniques & practices to foster collaboration, refine team dynamics, bring structure to their approaches and improve the way they worked in general.

We used 'Improvement Kata' and 'Coaching Kata' from Lean Management for learning, adapting, experimenting and coaching. It was a time to pause, observe and ponder over things.

In a nutshell, it was a time-boxed immersive accelerated learning opportunity which resulted in productivity improvements ranging from 10%-90%. MYOB ran this Dojo as an investment in their knowledge workers! It was an experiment run at both Auckland and Melbourne and was successful. This talk will give you glimpses of our 'dojo' adventure, learnings, challenges, interesting surprises and lots of 'aha' moments!

schedule 11 months ago

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45 Mins

Case Study

Beginner

This interactive session will explore connections and how personal mapping can be scaled to kick-start a platform to build better communications, trust and psychological safety to underpin your agility journey.

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Autonomous and empowered teams are a key building block of agile organisations but require a great deal of trust to work. Management and leadership must trust people and teams to do the right thing, and teams need to trust that management will support them when needed.

Transparency is a low-cost means of building trust. Transparency gained through the open sharing of information, particularly visual information, has played a large part in agile and lean thinking - from lean's visual controls, to XP's "big visible charts" and beyond.

We will explore how transparency, and the radiation of information, can build trust and cultures where "safe to fail" is more than a theoretical concept.

Alexandra Stokes - The Future of Work - HR disrupted

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

It’s 2018 and Agile working has become the new Way of Working. Once considered the territory of the reckless and sloppy, now most of the free world is considering how they can implement these better ways of working into their teams and orgs.

We've spent many years helping teams move with agility and learn to adapt, to lose low value processes and amplify their performance through these ways of working.

A constant thorn in the side of teams transitioning to these ways of working, is the baggage of OLD ways of working, in particular in Traditional HR processes that plague many teams. Through frustration, we started blogging about the Future of Work where we could ditch concepts like Performance Management Reviews and boxing people into rigid Job Descriptions. We wanted to see if we could spark some interest in trying different approaches that were more aligned to our 'Agile mindset'. For organisational agility can only really be achieved if we truly value individuals and interactions over HR processes and tools.

Our blogs garnered much interest and had companies like REA Group and MYOB reaching out to get involved in How Might We reinvent traditional HR approaches for a workplace of the Future. We even inspired the formation of a Meet-Up in the Netherlands!

Join with us at LAST conf where together we will design a new experiment to Unbox people from the Job Descriptions, and to Free People from the inhumanity of Performance Management reviews.

Jatin Bhasin - Go Lean or Go Bust: Be Ruthless to Survive

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Over the years REA has mastered the art of delivering products following the lean startup principles, however, working with a bank to create a home loans product was a different ballgame. Functioning in the Build-Measure-Learn cycles requires a fundamental change in the way people (or organizations) think and work.

In spring of 2017, REA made a big leap from being purely a media organization to venturing into financial services. As a result, there is now an innovative product offering in the Australian home loans market that allows consumers to sort out their home finance needs while they are still in the market looking for their dream home, all from the comfort of their living room couch.

This talk is about how to shape up your products with decisions based on data, metrics, and evidence over personal opinion.

Anne-Maree Adams - Listening to be heard; Active listening to save time, and gain patience in tech teams

schedule 11 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Active listening, as the name suggests, focuses on how we listen as humans in a workplace setting and how we can use these skills to our advantage. Anne-Maree has been facilitating in-house sessions for Xero AU examining how the practice of active listening can help teams and individuals to openly communicate, enhance working relationships and ultimately save time.

Posing the question "can you find your voice, by being a better listener" Anne-Maree has been investigating how the outdated ideas of active listening can be enhanced using techniques from the arts industry to be used as a tool to help strengthen our tech teams. Anne-Maree will share her discoveries from working with over 200 participants over two years at Xero AU - what worked, what failed and where to next and what can you do right now to embrace this technique.

Julia Harper - Releasing Your Inner Greatness - 4 Growth Principles

schedule 11 months ago

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90 Mins

Interactive

Beginner

You were created for a specific and unique purpose - there is a special mix of gifts and talents in you that need to be shared with the world. In today's workplaces, it's critical to have the skills to continually self-evaluate, evolve and inspire others to change. We apply continuous improvement to our products, but not often enough to ourselves and our cultures. So how do we access the greatness within ourselves and call it out from those we’re leading? This session will look at 4 principles that promote growth and foster transformative collaboration. You’ll come away with a combination of mindset and action points to put into practice.

Julia Harper - Releasing Your Inner Greatness - You, The System

schedule 11 months ago

Sold Out!

90 Mins

Interactive

Beginner

You were created for a specific and unique purpose - there is a special mix of gifts and talents in you that need to be shared with the world. In today's workplaces, it's critical to have the skills to continually self-evaluate, evolve and inspire others to change. We apply continuous improvement to our products, but not often enough to ourselves and our cultures. So how do we access the greatness within ourselves and call it out from those we’re leading?

Do you wish you were doing your best work but find that somehow you can't make it happen? Ever wondered why you keep repeating the same conflicts at different workplaces and with different teams? This session will delve into the specific areas of your life that, when unblocked, will allow the best version of yourself to operate more frequently. You’ll come away with a combination of mindset and action points to put into practice.

Aurelien Marando - Agile, beyond the buzz-word

schedule 1 year ago

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5 Mins

Lightning Talk

Beginner

Agile is now considered as a "must-have methodology" to be successful in developing software. Even, it starts extending to non-software businesses and its practices and principles are spreading out to many teams and organizations.

But beyond the buzz-words, we often race to apply solutions and miss the true values beyond naming, frameworks or tools provided by Agility.

This session is an Lightning talk to foundation ideas that underpin Agility. It revisits some basic fundamentals that have dropped out of the modern agile discourse when leading the change toward better ways of working. Beyond the buzz-word that Agile became, let remind us what be Agile truly is.

It will be particularly useful to agile consultants, scrum masters, iteration managers and change agents driving the agile agenda.

This session can be adapted to a longer Agile 101 format mixing introduction of fundamentals and debat/experience feedback.

Suzanne Nottage - The Agile Ironman: how moving from Waterfall to Agile in Triathlons cut 4 hours off my time, and how you can do the same at work

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Case Study

Beginner

* Many Agile practitioners don't have 100% free rein at work to practise Agile.

* After "failing" at Ironman with a Waterfall approach (multiple times), I experimented with Agile principles over several years, where I had 100% free rein to iterate, continuously improve and adapt. Ultimately, cutting 4 hours off my time and finishing 3rd in Ironman Australia 2017 in my age group.

* This is significant because at 5'2" and without any physical advantages, it was Agile principles (working smarter, not harder) that made the difference.

* You'll learn which principles had the biggest effects, and how you can apply these at work (or in other areas of your life).

Michele Playfair - The Conundrum of Job Titles

schedule 1 year ago

30 Mins

Interactive

Intermediate

Research into employee engagement asserts that what we want is "autonomy, mastery and purpose" not necessarily a corner office, a ping pong table, or a fancy job title.

Anecdotally though I have seen a different story where particularly those closer to the start of their career are very focused on job titles as evidence of progress.

Super-flat structures such Holacracy (where you perform a collection of roles rather than having a job title) only exacerbate this... there's really no concept of "promotion".

As managers/employers how do we attract, support, grow and retain our staff - is the answer more likely to be a giant skills matrix allowing progress through a level system than flat circles of autonomy?